YA Agony Awards: addendum

[rachelmanija]

While going through old LJ entries, I found this hilarious excerpt from a locked post. I was in Tokyo at the time, and having a lousy time for reasons having nothing to do with Japan:

Yesterday, rather than lurking miserably etc, I went to an English used bookshop in Ebisu on the theory that that would surely cheer me up. I immediately headed for children's/YA, hoping it would have lots of Bristish fantasy like the last time I was there. The first book I picked up was about a teen football player who becomes a quadriplegic. Just what I wanted to read. Nix! Then a book about a boy with a hawk. I flipped to the end. Someone shoots it. Next, race problems. Child labor in a coal mining town. Dead dogs. More race problems. Holocaust. Homeless teens. Holocaust. Homeless teens during the Holocaust. Race problems. Dead otters. Dead aborigines. Dead Jews.

Comments

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

There may be a reason Delia Sherman's The Changeling is the only YA I recall reading in the last year or so...

[oyceter]

Actually, there's a lot of cheerful YA right now, thanks in part to HP and the YA fantasy boom. But there's also a big boom in YA chicklit, and much of what I've been binging on is pretty fun and frothy.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's just the selection on the shelves in this town...

[oyceter]

All you needed on top of that was Emma Donoghue's Slammerkin!

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I'm sure this has nothing to do with the decline in reading among young people.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

This is why I stick to YA fantasy, for the most part.

[gnarlycranium.livejournal.com]

Whee! DEATH! And not even in the fun way!

[issen4.livejournal.com]

Those young 'uns. Need to toughen them up!

Maybe this is why I didn't read much YA until I was an adult.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

You see why those were used...

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Have you read any Sonia Levitin? I made the mistake of picking up one of her novels at one point, only to discover that the climax of the novel was the burning alive of the entire Jewish community of Strasbourg during the Black Death; and the emotional outcome of the novel was that the futuristic witness, who was assigned to watch the whole thing as punishment for his evil tendencies towards individuality, completely recanted said tendencies and firmly promised always to be exactly like his neighbors forevermore.

And then the universe was destroyed.

I am only kidding about that last.

GARTH NIX FOR THE WIN!

[andyleggett.livejournal.com]

I think you were right to stick with the Nix--Shade's Children seems like it would be depressing, but it ends fairly happily for what is technically a sub-genre of post-apocalyptic.

[cicer.livejournal.com]

Mercy. As telophase said, this is why I read mostly YA fantasy. Much cheerier. I do like the occasional depressing book, but I can only take those sorts of things in small doses. And as others have said, I definitely read more YA fiction as an adult than I did as a teen. I suppose that's because I was depressed enough at that age; I really didn't need to be reading about a homeless teenager who was raped during the holocaust and then had to watch their family starve to death and shoot their dog before ending up in an insane asylum (and according to the poll, this would be the ultimate YA book setup!).

[slobbit.livejournal.com]

I think depressing YA novels exist to tell grumpy pre-and early teens to stop bitching about their Oh Woe Miserable Lives, because there's much worse out there than parents who Don't Understand. :-)